Judge, Jury, and Executioner A defining event and the burden of return after death.

How do I even begin to tell this story? At what point do I risk opening myself up to scrutiny, cries of “victim mentality,” accusations of being a “pathetic victim,” and the myriad of slurs and insults thrown at me with an almost salacious glee?

I have been down this road before. I made the mistake of telling my story on social media. It left me burned out, used up, a target of hate, and taken advantage of from the use of my story to sell products to literal extortion.

The bullies that were there before, the people who had some sort of vendetta due to me disengaging from the toxicity of their behaviors. I wanted no part of it, but evidently I was to continue living rent free in the minds of people who couldn’t let go of failing friendships that had run their course. Eventually these same people would come to try to deny what happened to me really happened.

I can guarantee it happened. I will bear the burden of it for the rest of my life. It will be what ends my life way too soon.

It was a defining event, traumatic in the way that hacking off a limb is traumatic. What happened was worse than being trafficked as a child, worse than the foster care system where I was abused and starved, worse than waking up in a bed that was not mine in a small town in the middle of nowhere; I was taught to hide my ethnicity and the life I led before I was “saved” by my adoptive parents.

I am permanently disabled and declining because a nurse, in a trusted position of post-surgical recovery from a life-saving procedure, made a decision to access a medication I was highly allergic to, as indicated by my medical chart and the two red allergy bands on my wrists. What she did next still confounds me to this day, two and a half years later. She injected the medication directly into my IV. The medication used was not one I had asked for; it wasn’t even on my approved list of postsurgical interventions.

I do not take pain medications. I have an alternative pain management program that coincides with my five years of hard-earned sobriety. I did not ask for a pain medication in my post-surgical stupor as I was still under the influence of anesthesia.

What happened next came fast, and it came with violence. I felt my heart fail and stop.

“I’m dying!” I screamed. Because I was.

That was the last thing I remember of the physical world.

What happened next is something I don’t wish to reveal yet. I’m just not ready to tell the world. I can’t tell you why; I just know today is not the day. Each successive day that comes along is also not the day. I’m sure I will know when and if that day will come. Until then I hold it close to my heart.

I do remember a brief moment in the ambulance on the way to the ICU, but after that not much of anything comes up, except for waking up from a nap in a chair, my heart still in AFIB and tachycardia—my brain exploded into a million fireworks. A stroke code was called, then a flurry of tests that revealed nothing. Except there was something found at midnight by an MRI technician after I had been moved from the ICU to a regular room.

I was immediately moved back to the ICU after the MRI.

I had a dual simultaneous stroke in the left side of my cerebellum. It was a “perfect storm,” my cardiologist would explain later. No one knew why it happened, but they did know the defining action that put it all into motion.

The match that lit the fuse was the hydromorphone, 7-10 times stronger than morphine, of which I am also highly allergic to, injected directly into my veins by the hand of a willfully incompetent nurse.

A nurse who was a trusted caregiver, supposedly carefully screened for her ethics to help in the surgery that took me to flat, finally free of the curse of BRCA positivity that has plagued generations of my family, including my biological mother, stealing their lives far too soon.

Breast cancer even took my adoptive uncle. One day he was here, and the next we were watching a parade of fire engines carrying his casket to a final resting place. There were bagpipes, and hundreds of firefighters lined up to celebrate the life and mourn the death of a great man that I wish I had gotten more time to know, a man who was a model of tender masculinity and fierce strength.

This fierce strength would prove to be my greatest ally in the coming year of recovery. The tender masculinity would help me become gentle where I was harmed during the ongoing violence I had navigated much of my life.

I think this is where I need to stop in the story. Recovery and rehabilitation are happening. Most of it in the early days, as there is very little available in the way of recovery for stroke patients after we are what is considered “recovered,” or we are tossed aside to fight the system of disability that is so woefully inadequate in the United States.

It is a system that many of us are all too familiar with; a similar system runs parallel—that of the medical industrial complex and the juggernaut of a for-profit insurance industry, even if you are covered under essential social healthcare programs like Medicaid or Medicare.

It is the same system that a wealthy Ivy League graduate raged against when he gunned down Brian Thompson in a cold-blooded, shoot-him-in-the-back-and-run murder, planned carefully and acted upon impulsively.

Were the actions of the nurse who took my life, my hopes, my dreams, and my passion as an aspiring athlete planned carefully and acted upon impulsively as well? I do not know. I may never know. Litigation on my case has stretched out past the 30 months I was given the impression it would be resolved within. I don’t know how much longer it will go on. I may not even be here to finish it by the time it reaches closure and a settlement.

Do you think Brian’s wife and children have found closure?

Maybe they found it in the lowering of his body into the ground, his remains home to their final resting place. Perhaps they find it in watching the countless videos, photographs, and fangirls fawning over the person who took their own hopes and dreams away, taking their future smiles and future aspirations.

Brian was tried, judged, and executed on the spot to a chorus of public voices hailing his death, his murder, as justified. I am sure much in the same way there are those who think what the nurse did to me was justified.

I haven’t found closure. I don’t know if I ever will.

But what I do know is this. I would not wish what has been the nightmare of the aftermath, what will be the rest of my life, on anyone.

And when I say anyone, I especially mean the one person who chose, much like Brian’s killer, to be judge, jury, and executioner for me.